My pin satirizes the brutality of the french revolutionaries by mocking their slogan in A Tale of Two Cities, “Life, Liberty, Fraternity, or Death.” Dickens himself comments that of the four ideas in the slogan, death is the easiest to achieve, and the peasants are all about easy. In the reign of terror alone, revolutionaries executed over 60,000 people in just 18 short months, nearly all without fair trial or cause. Many of these victims included noble women and children. Clearly, the revolution valued death over their three values of liberty. My propaganda pin discourages joining such a brutal revolution by exaggerating this brutality with the blood spatter, crying baby beneath the revolution’s execution device, the guillotine (with revolutionary symbols of the red-cap and tri-color), and by changing their slogan to “and death.” These exaggerations invoke emotions of anger and fear of these atrocities. Furthermore, it mocks the justification that the revolution used with regard to their brutality: justice and equality for their children. They used the nobles' history of brutality to justify their actions. The revolutionaries hoped to invoke emotions of anger and justice against the nobility; however, my noble propaganda pin turns the feelings around and invokes an anger against the revolutionary brutality instead, inspiring people to either not join them or stop them. The nobles highlight such malice through my pin, 300 years later.
My pin satirizes the brutality of the french revolutionaries by mocking their slogan in A Tale of Two Cities, “Life, Liberty, Fraternity, or Death.” Dickens himself comments that of the four ideas in the slogan, death is the easiest to achieve, and the peasants are all about easy. In the reign of terror alone, revolutionaries executed over 60,000 people in just 18 short months, nearly all without fair trial or cause. Many of these victims included noble women and children. Clearly, the revolution valued death over their three values of liberty. My propaganda pin discourages joining such a brutal revolution by exaggerating this brutality with the blood spatter, crying baby beneath the revolution’s execution device, the guillotine (with revolutionary symbols of the red-cap and tri-color), and by changing their slogan to “and death.” These exaggerations invoke emotions of anger and fear of these atrocities. Furthermore, it mocks the justification that the revolution used with regard to their brutality: justice and equality for their children. They used the nobles' history of brutality to justify their actions. The revolutionaries hoped to invoke emotions of anger and justice against the nobility; however, my noble propaganda pin turns the feelings around and invokes an anger against the revolutionary brutality instead, inspiring people to either not join them or stop them. The nobles highlight such malice through my pin, 300 years later.